{"id":194184,"date":"2025-09-02T13:15:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T13:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/194184\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T13:15:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T13:15:08","slug":"tybee-begins-major-stormwater-development-updates-this-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/194184\/","title":{"rendered":"Tybee begins major stormwater development updates this fall"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tybee Island got soaked with 2 feet of rain just this month, just as the island prepares for an $80 million flush via pipes, plants, and reservoirs.<\/p>\n

Tybee Island, among Georgia\u2019s first line of defense against storms, has\u00a0absorbed August’s 2 feet of rain about as best as one can expect from an already-soaked sponge. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ground is saturated,\u201d said Tybee Engineer and Director of Infrastructure Peter Gulbronson.\u00a0Sewer lines are breaking and overflowing<\/a>; tides and groundwater\u00a0levels are rising<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The island is even wetter than last year when Hurricane Debby brought about 9 inches of rain over a few days, he added. “Before that storm, we didn’t have continual rainfall, so a lot of that rainfall percolated into the ground.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

While not much more can done to dry the ground for this hurricane season, the city is preparing\u00a0to bail out the island from future storms and floods with as many buckets as possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Two weeks ago, Tybee announced on Facebook<\/a> that it will begin plans for major stormwater infrastructure updates\u00a0included in its Stormwater Management Plan,<\/a> which seeks to invest an estimated $80 million in stormwater maintenance and projects over the next 20 or so years. Integrated with the plan is the 2023 Natural Infrastructure Master Plan<\/a> developed with the University of Georgia (UGA), which claims that nature-based solutions will alleviate flood load by more than 20%.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe nature-based plan relies on our pumps and pipes, and our pumps and pipes rely on the nature-based plan,\u201d said Alan Robertson, a consultant and project lead for resilience plans on Tybee.\u00a0<\/p>\n

More: <\/strong>The Brown Side of Coastal Flooding: From Savannah to Brunswick, sewage spills on the rise<\/a><\/p>\n

More: <\/strong>Beach erosion, rising tides and groundwater, and feral hogs impede sea turtle hatchings<\/a><\/p>\n

Stretching Tybee\u2019s stormwater capacity\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tybee Island sticks out from Georgia like the tip of a nose.\u00a0Unfortunately, it’s among the first coastal communities<\/a> to get whacked.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can’t build to survive a Category 3 direct strike,\u201d said Robertson. \u201cIt’s not worth the money.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instead, the city’s resilience strategy is to \u201cabsorb the blow\u201d and bounce back quicker, said Robertson. “We were off the island for five days in 2016 with Hurricane Matthew. We’re hopeful that the work we do is if\u00a0Matthew came at us again, maybe we’re back in two days.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2019, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) granted the city nearly $190,000 for a Stormwater Master Plan<\/a> conducted by Thomas & Hutton and completed two years later, said Robertson, which Tybee matched with nearly $63,000. From there, the city developed a list of priorities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

First on the docket is flushing water out of the low-lying south end of Tybee, once home to \u201cmarshes and ponds that the city filled in over time,\u201d Robertson explained. \u00a0<\/p>\n

In south Tybee, the city hopes to build a reservoir under the 14th Street parking lot where beachgoers shell out an $8 daily parking fee. \u201cIf you can’t stop the water from coming in, then you gotta find a way to get rid of it,\u201d he added. \u201cSo, you hold the water there and at a low tide, you pump it out.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The lot is \u201cthe largest area the city has that they could use to have retention,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whether Tybee will also retain the funds, however, weighs heavily on Washington\u2019s whims. The Facebook post states that the city will know this fall whether they receive the $10 million Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant for the reservoir.<\/p>\n

“The future of federal funding is always up in the air,\u201d said Robertson. And about 80% of their plans rely on it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Waiting for payday<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the city will scope out how water will\u00a0exit the reservoir, likely by replacing an 18-inch stormwater pipe with a quarter mile 54-inch pipe at 15th Street intended to withstand a 10-year storm event\u2014increasing flow capacity nine-fold.<\/p>\n

Even if the reservoir project doesn\u2019t come to fruition, directing the neighborhood\u2019s stormwater into a bigger pipe will\u00a0prevent water from ponding in the street, said Gulbronson. Stormwater pipes are normally up to 48 inches in diameter on Tybee,\u00a0but about 70% of them are undersized, he estimated.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Again, funding for the pipe is almost secured.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The U.S. EPA obligated $2.6 million to the 15th Street pipe, said Gulbronson, which the city matched with $650,000. But \u201cwith the way things are in Washington right now, I don’t have an exact date\u201d on when the city will receive the funds.\u00a0But once the “final paperwork” is submitted, the project will begin construction in January and finish by late May.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pipes and Plants\u00a0<\/p>\n

When the 15th Street pipe gets replaced, \u201cwe’re going to consider rain gardens and putting nature-based elements on right-of-ways,\u201d said Robertson. It’s just one example of how the city plans on \u201ccombining gray with green\u201d in its Natural Infrastructure Master Plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rain gardens in Glenn and Chatham Counties have already shown to perform \u201creally well,\u201d said UGA Stormwater Specialist Jessica Brown. Each of these gardens act as \u201clayer cakes\u201d of native plants, sediments and rocks that percolate water down into the soil, diverting water from overflowing storm drains. \u00a0<\/p>\n

And natural amendments are baked into gray infrastructure itself. \u00a0<\/p>\n

At a culvert on 6th Street, \u201cour plan is to update it to today’s standards: larger, box culvert, bottomless,\u201d wrote Robertson in an email. The three-sided culvert will use the stream bed as its bottom as a more natural passage for fish crossings. Living shorelines<\/a> will also line the stream’s edges, he added. The culvert is one of several projects funded by a $380,000 grant from the nonprofit\u00a0National Fish and Wildlife Foundation<\/a> to promote coastal resilience with nature-based solutions, which the city has matched with $320,000, wrote Robertson.<\/p>\n

Further (Not Federal) Funding \u00a0<\/p>\n

As support from Washington continues to be uncertain, the city plows ahead with other cash flows. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Tybee and the Georgia Emergency Management Agency will reapply the $2 million Safe Shelter grant to the city’s Stormwater Management Plan and Natural Infrastructure Master Plan projects; the Georgia Environmental Finance Authority will loan $2.4 million for other key sewer system improvements; and $4.3 million in Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax 8 funding<\/a> for stormwater and resiliency infrastructure projects will appear on the November ballot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt all depends on money,\u201d stated Robertson. \u201cAnd grant approvals.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jillian Magtoto covers climate change and the environment in coastal Georgia. You can reach her at jmagtoto@gannett.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tybee Island got soaked with 2 feet of rain just this month, just as the island prepares for…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":194185,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[2696,2701,647,22608,691,14079,14088,10556,74290,58147,58150,9886,26306,2693,2697,3534,2488,16721,746,441,14520,8072,4353,7007,864,2487,5173,14082,23515,425,4297,728,5335,3628,50227,108325,2698,2702,942,50,1539,450,950,108322,95202,159,108321,55046,108326,108323,31115,108327,7925,3883,645,2490,62066,108324,1763,443,1164,9270,24008,646,67,132,4280,5541,68,313],"class_list":{"0":"post-194184","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-accidents","9":"tag-accidents-u0026-disasters","10":"tag-affiliate","11":"tag-agency","12":"tag-ai","13":"tag-beaches","14":"tag-beaches-u0026-islands","15":"tag-civil","16":"tag-civil-engineering","17":"tag-coastal","18":"tag-coastal-floods","19":"tag-construction","20":"tag-construction-u0026-maintenance","21":"tag-disaster","22":"tag-disasters","23":"tag-emergency","24":"tag-enabled","25":"tag-engineering","26":"tag-environment","27":"tag-federal","28":"tag-federal-emergency-management-agency","29":"tag-floods","30":"tag-georgia","31":"tag-green","32":"tag-green-infrastructure","33":"tag-highlights","34":"tag-infrastructure","35":"tag-islands","36":"tag-journalism","37":"tag-local","38":"tag-local-affiliate-travel","39":"tag-local-news","40":"tag-maintenance","41":"tag-management","42":"tag-municipal","43":"tag-municipal-separate-storm-sewer-system","44":"tag-natural","45":"tag-natural-disaster","46":"tag-neutral","47":"tag-news","48":"tag-of","49":"tag-overall","50":"tag-overall-neutral","51":"tag-overflows","52":"tag-runoff","53":"tag-science","54":"tag-separate","55":"tag-sewer","56":"tag-sewer-overflows","57":"tag-sewers","58":"tag-solutions","59":"tag-solutions-journalism","60":"tag-storm","61":"tag-storms","62":"tag-story","63":"tag-story-highlights-ai-enabled","64":"tag-surface","65":"tag-surface-runoff","66":"tag-sustainability","67":"tag-system","68":"tag-travel","69":"tag-tropical","70":"tag-tropical-storms","71":"tag-u0026","72":"tag-united-states","73":"tag-unitedstates","74":"tag-university","75":"tag-university-of-georgia","76":"tag-us","77":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}